


thinking all love ever does is break, and burn, and end

by Clones_and_gallifrey



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Break Up, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, its sad im SORRRY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-29 05:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11433855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clones_and_gallifrey/pseuds/Clones_and_gallifrey
Summary: "Amy tries not to think too much about the past. More specifically, the part of her past that involves Jake. It’s complicated, and difficult not to, because their lives were so interwoven for such a long time, growing together and then splitting apart."Life happens, and Jake and Amy break up. Five years later, they find their way back to each other. Told out of order, this is the story of how.





	thinking all love ever does is break, and burn, and end

**Author's Note:**

> So I got this prompt from a list I reblogged, from the awesome @tall-butt over on tumblr: 'exes meeting again after not speaking for years au'. It was gonna be 5k, maximum, but then THIS HAPPENED. 
> 
> Eternal thanks to Carrie and Erica for letting me yell about this.
> 
> Things that helped to inspire this fic:  
> \- HIMYM season two  
> \- The book/movie Love, Rosie  
> \- Taylor Swift's entire discography

**December 23rd, 2018**

**Text message  11/29/18   19:53**

**Ames**

_When are you coming home?_

 

**Text message  11/29/18   20:09**

**Jake Peralta**

_New lead in case. Will b late._

 

**Text message  12/03/18   21:02**

**Jake Peralta**

_Guess it’s ur turn to wrk late. Love u._

 

**Text message  12/03/18   22:16**

**Ames**

_Sorry. Crazy day._

 

**Text message  12/10/18   18:32**

**Ames**

_Ordering Chinese food. Do you want me to order some for you?_

 

**Text message  12/10/18   18:49**

**Jake Peralta**

_No thx, will b late. Love u._

 

**Text message  12/19/18   14:11**

**Ames**

_It feels like I haven’t really seen you for weeks. I’ll be home on time tonight. Love you._

 

**Text message  12/19/18   18:08**

**Jake Peralta**

_Just got in. Found a letter on table… babe are u taking a job in Chicago?? Call me. Or just come home maybe. Love u._

It happens so slowly that Jake almost doesn’t notice it. Once, years and years ago, Jake had fallen into the trap of clicking related Youtube video after related Youtube video, and one of them had explained how you can drop a frog into hot water and it will jump out, but put it in cold water and heat it up slowly and it’ll stay there till it’s dead. He doesn’t know if it’s true, hasn’t ever found out the answer, but he’s staring at the flickering Christmas lights on the balcony railings of some apartment across the street and knows without a shadow of a doubt that it is.

He doesn’t know how it happened. Maybe he should have washed the dishes more or told her how pretty she looked every time he saw her from across the room and felt his heart swell up with love, like it couldn’t possibly contain it all.

What he does know is that she wasn’t happy. That none of this was working for her. That he stopped seeing her eyes light up when she smiled.

“Jake, I’m sorry.” That’s how it starts. With a voice muddied with a sob.

It starts with Jake spinning around from drying the silver pot they’d bought together a year ago when the chicken recipe they’d tried to make together dried solidly onto the bottom of their old one. It starts with fear and concern because Amy’s standing in the kitchen with tears spilling down her cheeks so something must be really and truly _wrong_.

“Babe? What is it?” Jake takes a step towards her but she takes one back.

He thinks it’s because of the fight. Because there’s _always_ a fight these days. They’re not screaming ones, not smashing plates against the walls like in the movies. It’s hurried bickering turning into eye-rolling and clenched fists and hours of silent treatment. It’s a constant hum of unhappiness. Jake convinces himself it’s just a rough patch. It’s Amy’s new job at her new precinct with her new responsibilities. It’s the double homicide Jake’s been working for the past month. It’s just called falling out of sync, and that’s happened before and they were ok. So they will be this time.

“ _Don’t_ do that!” Amy pleads, tears falling thick and fast. There are tears in his own eyes now, too, if for no reason other than how much he hates seeing her in pain.

“Don’t do what?” He thinks she’s still talking about the fight, or maybe the way he’s drying the pot.

“Don’t call me babe. Don’t make this harder, Jake.” She’s whispering, voice low and hoarse. Jake scans the dark circles under her eyes and wonders how long it’s been since she slept properly.

“Don’t make what harder? The fight? I’m sorry, I just-”

“No. Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t do that Jake, don’t make any of this… I just can’t. I _can’t_ ,” her face is scrunched up with the sobs and she buries it in her hands and an uncomfortable tightness makes its home in Jake’s chest, atop his lungs so that he can’t remember quite how to draw air in. It doesn’t make sense.

None of it makes sense and he doesn’t know quite how they got here or how _he let them_ get here. Worst of all he doesn’t know what comes next. Doesn’t let himself think about it, believe it, consider it. Maybe if he doesn’t say another single word, just freezes in place right here, the whole of time will stop to accommodate him. If time stands still, he’ll be able to think of a way to fix this. Or he won’t, and it will all be frozen forever, but then he won’t have to hear her say the words he’s heard her say in a hundred nightmares already.  

She draws in a breath. “Jake.” She peels her hands away from her face. He wants to drop the pot on the ground and dive for her hands, to fuse them to his own. “Jake, this isn’t working out. None of this. It isn’t how I thought…” She stops herself, looking up at him. “I can’t do this anymore. This. _Us_ ,” she gestures at him like he needs her to spell it out. Which he does, because _this isn’t happening_ , not really. Because they _love_ each other, and because of the shiny ring on her left hand and how they both cried happy tears when he gave it to her.

“What… what do you mean?” His mouth is dry. And he thinks that all of the blood in his body is pooling at his feet.

“This isn’t working anymore. We both know it. I… I don’t want to be with you if it’s just going to make both of us unhappy.” Her words are barely coherent. She’s crying so hard that Jake doesn’t know how she’s still breathing.

He’s still, in the middle of the kitchen, knuckles paling against the cold handle of the pot. He was going to put the dishes away, and then grab the pint of chocolate chip ice cream from the freezer and two spoons. He was going to tell her he was sorry, that the fight was dumb, that he loves her. They were going to watch a movie and talk about their days and it was going to be ok. Everything was going to be alright.

Except that now it isn’t. Now tt’s an hour later, and Jake can’t believe that he’s made it through a whole hour. An entire sixty minutes. Twenty-four more of these and he will have made it through one day. The problem is that he doesn’t think he can keep going for that long, because Amy’s gone with four heavy bags but without the ring that catches the sunlight and reminds him how lucky he is. It’s sitting on the unit by the front door and he can’t bring himself to go near it anymore. The thing that he found after days and days of searching through jewellery stores and online stores and antiques booths with red coverings at sprawling markets. It’s silver with sapphires and he chose it himself and proposed on their rooftop in the rain. It was over a year ago now, but it may as well have happened to someone else, in some other universe, now.

Jake’s no stranger to being left. People leave all the time, and leaving is just a part of life, and he knows that. And he’s not a stranger to it hurting either, thanks to his dad leaving him filled with confusion and anger and wondering if he did something wrong. But this pain, this _pit_ in his chest and sick feeling in his stomach and the ache in his head and the cut on his hand from dropping a glass bottle on the floor. This pain is something new. He’s sitting on the floor of their living room, knees drawn up to his chest, and it’s Christmas eve tomorrow and the gifts he’s bought for Amy are sitting within sight and he doesn’t know how to process this or think or breathe or be. Everything in his life, for the past three-and-a-half years, and maybe even longer, has been viewed through the lens of a person with a future. All of his plans for the weekend and for the future and his purchases and his text messages.

But now she’s gone, and he doesn’t think that the feeling in his chest is ever going to go away. He isn’t sure that it’s possible to survive this much pain. Isn’t sure he’s ever going to see it get light outside again.

**February 27th, 2022**

**Text message  02/27/22   10:12**

**Amy**

_Cal, I’ll pick you up some stuff at the market today._

Amy tries not to think too much about the past. More specifically, the part of her past that involves Jake. It’s complicated, and difficult not to, because their lives were so interwoven for such a long time, growing together and then splitting apart. It’s difficult because whenever she starts to tell a story that happens to be set in that far-away span of her life, she has to stop for a second and wait for the ache of longing to pass before she can carry on. All of that was a long, long time ago, back when she was a whole different person.

Even the city was different. She misses New York, but it’s not difficult to talk about that. It’s not difficult, when her friends ask, to smile sadly and tell them that yes, she misses it, but she loves Chicago, too. And she does. She loves the pizza here, and the museums, and evenings walking along by the water. She loves her little house and the precinct she helps to command as lieutenant, and she loves the friend group she fell into so easily. She also loves Cal. She loves the way that Cal’s hair flops into his eyes when he’s too sleepy to push it back, and the soft way he presses kisses to her temple. She loves the warm office at the children’s hospital and the way he decorates his files with bright animal stickers. She loves how safe she feels when she’s with him, and the comforting way his arm slides around her waist when they stand close together.

What she doesn’t love about Cal is the constant feeling that she’s lying to him. They’ve been together for almost three years now. Almost longer than she was ever with Jake, and she hates herself for the pang of regret coursing through her veins the minute she realises that, and every time it springs to mind since. And she can’t _tell_ Cal that, because it isn’t fair. It’s the slowest kind of torture, to think that the person you love with everything you have doesn’t feel the same about you. To wonder if they’d be happier without you. (She knows that all too well. First hand. Heartbreakingly, earth shatteringly.)

Cal knows about Jake. Amy doesn’t like to admit it but she’d been in a difficult place when Cal stepped into her life, and it had been a necessity, really, to tell him why. But Cal doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t know that sometimes she stares up at the ceiling at night wondering about her old life. She stopped herself, years ago now, from seeking out information about her old friends, limiting herself to the occasional Facebook post, just if it happens to pop up. She wonders if they’re happy. Amy thinks about her old apartment, too, wondering if Jake still lives there or if he moved out, and whether the person who lives there now is treating it with as much love as she had. If their furniture is spread out the same way or if they’ve fixed the bathroom floor where it bows from water damage.

Mainly, in her quiet night time musings, she’s thinking about Jake himself. She’s wondering whether he’s safe and happy, whether he’s found someone new to light up his whole face when they enter the room (she could find out, of course, but she doesn’t want to. Isn’t ready yet, even after all this time).

Frequently, she wonders who she would be if she’d stayed.

It’s a crisp, sunny Saturday in February when Amy bumps into two of the people that she’s left behind, wandering through the haphazard rows of a Farmer’s Market. Amy’s carrying a string bag with a selection of vegetables inside it, the kind of leafy greens that Cal eats by the handful. He tells his patients, the kids at the hospital, that they’re filled with iron to make your blood a hundred times more powerful.

“Amy Santiago?” A voice, somewhere behind her, freezes her in place, reaching over to pick up a jar of organic honey. “It _is_ you!” Amy turns to her left, and is faced with one of the smiling faces she sees when she stares up at the ceiling in the dark. It’s Terry, Sharon not far behind.

“Oh my God! Sarge!” Amy’s beaming, lugging her bag of green vegetables towards them. The familiar feeling of longing tugging at her stomach, combined with happiness at seeing her old friends.

Two seconds in their presence is enough for dramatic flashbacks of the Jimmy Jab Games and nights at the bar and sitting in the courthouse the time Jake and Rosa got released from prison, and everyone raising a glass on the night that Jake got down on one knee and Amy said yes and they were filled to the brim with pure happiness, and Amy wanted her life to just go on the way it was. Life doesn’t always work that way.

“I’m actually a Captain now,” Terry tells her proudly. “Terry worked _really_ hard.”

“We’re so proud of you,” Sharon’s rubbing circles on Terry’s back, her expression an open book. She’s proud, and full of love and happiness. Once upon a time, Amy thought that she and Jake would be just like them. Would get married and have babies and a nice house and make each other proud every single day.

“How have you been? It’s been, what, four years now? Are you doing ok?” Terry asks. Amy isn’t sure how to answer. She stops for a second, sifting through her options, and what she should tell him, and whether he’s going to feed any of it back to anyone else. To Jake.

“I’m good. Yeah. Great,” Amy’s smile starts to feel out of place, slipping a little around the edges. “How are you guys? How’s New York? Do you still see any of the Nine-Nine?” She’s genuinely curious about them, of course, but a large part of her is trying to ask about Jake without _asking about Jake._ It’s been years and years of telling herself not to dwell on him, not to look at his Facebook page, not to Google his name. But how’s she supposed to resist this? A genuine account from a primary source, not the skewed posts on social media.

Terry looks at her for a second, something unreadable in the way he holds her gaze. “New York’s good. Still standing. And I’m over at the seven-two now, but I still see everyone around, sure. Captain Holt and Kevin got a new dog, Charles and Genevieve adopted a daughter last year, and Gina and Rosa just closed on a new place.”

Amy knows most of that stuff already, from her limited perusing of her Facebook timeline. She’s glad to hear that they’re all doing well, all living wonderful lives back in the city. But now she just wants to hear Terry say something about the one person she’s seen next to nothing about.

“And Jake’s ok, too,” Terry lowers his voice for the last part, treating her with kid gloves. Maybe she should be mad, but really she’s thankful. “He just made Sergeant, actually. He got a really great score on the exam.”

“He did?” Amy can’t stop the flutter of pride she feels at that. She’d never have doubted him, not even before they got together, and no matter what has happened between them in those long years, it’s good to hear that he’s doing so well at something that means so much to him.

“Yeah,” Terry confirms. “He went through a rough time, back… well, you don’t wanna hear about that,” Terry tells her with a nonchalant wave of his hand. Her blood runs cold, because although she’s had reason to suspect, nothing’s been confirmed, so she’s been able to deny that her leaving left Jake in too bad of a place. He wasn’t happy with her, not in the end. He’s got to be better now. “He’s transferring to the eight-five to take the sergeant's position, and he’s really excited about it,” Terry continues, as if he can read her mind. “He’s doing ok. Really,” Terry’s smiling again. It’s wistful, but a smile all the same.

“Thank you,” Amy nods at him, a silent understanding. She knows it’s a cliche, but her shoulders feel a little lighter now. The weight of _not knowing_ has been crushing her. The weight of wondering and what-ifs and could-have-beens. But he’s doing ok. He made sergeant. And she’s doing ok, too. “So what are you doing in Chicago?”

Sharon launches into an explanation about how one of her oldest friends had given them coupons for a spa weekend in a hotel in the city for their wedding anniversary, and they make idle conversation about hot stone massages and pedicures for five minutes, before they have to go to make it to the airport on time for their flight back to New York.

Amy watches them go until tears block them from view. Then, she goes back for the organic honey, and makes her way home to the cosy house she shares with Cal. When she gets in, he’s cooking apple pies and singing his way around the kitchen to country music. He kisses her on the temple, like always, tells her he loves her, and thanks her for buying the greens. Amy goes upstairs and stops fighting the urge to look at Jake’s Facebook profile. She needs something to convince herself, once and for all, that what she did was right.

**July 9th, 2020**

**Text message  07/09/20   19:28**

**Jake (BFF)**

_Stopped at this waffle truck. Think u would like it._

 

**Text message  07/09/20   19:29**

**Charles**

_If you think I’d like it then you’re probably right!! Text me pics._

 

**Text message  07/09/20   19:30**

**Charles**

_What’s it called?_

 

**Text message  07/09/20   19:32**

**Charles**

_Where are the pics? Checked the blog, there’s definitely a gap where a waffle related article would fit in nicely._

 

**Text message  07/09/20   19:35**

**Charles**

_It’s me, Charles, again. Call me later re:waffle truck._

 

Alli makes her home in Jake’s life before he’s even aware that she’s really there. Before he realises that she’s this actual part of life, like a boulder parting a river. If she was removed, he’d be ok again, but there’d be a crater left to fill. The river would never really go back to how it was again.

(When Amy left it was a mudslide. A whole cliff’s edge falling into the river and stopping it in its tracks).

Jake’s got coping mechanisms in place now. For a long time, he didn’t, and it felt like he was spending his days waiting for something. For a year, give, or take, Post Amy (capitalised, because they’re the two most important words in the world. Because they changed his life more than anything ever has, or ever will, ever again.), Jake’s walking around in a haze. He works as many shifts as he’s allowed, throwing himself into the mental workout that being a detective generally is, and spends the rest of his time sleeping, or drinking something eye-wateringly strong, or sitting across from a revolving door of concerned people and pretending that he’s fine. Sometimes it’s his mom, gripping his hands across her kitchen table, or sometimes it’s someone from work. Frequently, Charles, who often ends up crying himself whilst Jake pats him on the back and tells him it’s ok (but oh God, it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t), and sometimes it’s Captain Holt, trying his hardest to make Jake feel supported and worthy and to make his life feel liveable again. Gina and Rosa are there too, some of the time, and they take him bar hopping or help him smash plates in the alley behind his apartment block, or bring little Indigo over and force Jake to play dolls with her. After they move in together they let him sleep on their couch as much as he needs. It just doesn’t feel real, and suddenly it’s December again and it’s been one year. One year without so much as a text message from Amy.

Jake doesn’t need any kind of communication with her to know that she doesn’t miss him. In August her Facebook status had changed from the painful ‘single’ to the agonising ‘in a relationship’. The guy’s name is Cal and he looks like one of those models from a beach wear catalogue. To top it off, he’s a doctor at a children’s hospital. Jake could never compete with that.

But he never thought that he would have to, because he used to make Amy laugh, and she used to kiss him a smile on her lips, and their silences were filled with whispered I love yous.

In December, after three days straight of staying in bed with the curtains drawn, Jake’s friends throw an intervention. An honest-to-God intervention with a hand-painted banner and speeches written on ruled memo cards. It’s at Captain Holt’s house, and he explains that Gina had shown him the popular television programme ‘Intervention’, and he’d agreed to let her set one up at his home. Everyone tells him they want him to be happy, and Jake yells that unless they have a time machine that isn’t going to happen. There’s a full minute of silence before someone starts to giggle, and then they’re all laughing and somewhere along the way it morphs into crying. It’s hours until Jake goes home, but when he does, things are a little lighter. Two days later, he calls Rosa, and together they sort through the pieces of the apartment that Amy left behind. The pieces that Jake hasn’t been able to even look at. They’re stuck, dotted around the rooms wherever Amy left them, like some kind of shrine to the person Jake used to be. Rosa’s all set to burn them, but Jake isn’t ready for that. One step at a time. Rosa has a storage unit which she explicitly forbids Jake from telling anyone else about, or telling him the location of, and she takes them away to store for another time. Maybe Amy will come back for them, or maybe she won’t, and Jake will donate them or sell them or burn them after all.

2020 sees Jake cutting down his working hours a little, cutting his alcohol consumption a _lot_ , and trying his hardest to get his life back. He’s trying to get out more, just for the hell of it, and on a summery July evening he’s on his way home from Charles and Genevieve’s house after dinner when he passes by a bright purple waffle truck with a long line of people out front and decides to stop, just for the hell of it.

“What kind are you gonna get?” The girl in front of him is asking as the line moves forwards. She’s facing him, her eyes locking with his. She’s tall, almost level with him, with blonde hair in Princess Leia style buns on either side of her head.

“Uh… whatever kind contains the most sugar,” he tells her, truthfully.

“The red velvet brownie ones are _to die for_ ,” she says, using hand movements for emphasis.

“So you’re a regular at…” he stops to read the name of the waffle truck, displayed in neon letters on its side, “Waffle Suite?”

“Oh, sure,” she nods, “I work for this new media company, and they had me come down to sample some of the different kinds for an article we ran. You could say that it was love at first _bite_ ,” she winks, and Jake bites back a smile.

“That was terrible. I’m a detective, and I _could_ arrest you for that pun,” he tells her, and it’s been a matter of seconds but feels so good to be joking with somebody again. Somebody new. Somebody who’s looking at him without the tiniest amount of pity.

“Oh, well if you’re gonna arrest me you’re gonna need my full name and contact details, right?” The girl asks, smiling widely enough to show all of a set of perfectly straight teeth. She offers him her hand and he takes it, shaking it. It’s soft, and her nails and painted light purple. “I’m Alli Carter.”

“Jake Peralta.”

Alli keeps hold of his hand, using her free one to brush a strand of loose hair, caught by the breeze, behind her ear.

“Did you know, Jake Peralta, that waffles taste the best when you eat them outside. And when you share them with somebody,” Alli tells him, and Jake’s heart skips a little, like just talking to a pretty girl at a waffle truck is enough to pave over some of the cracks, deep set into the organ.

Alli orders a maple syrup and coffee waffle, which Jake wrinkles his nose at, and he orders the red velvet brownie waffle. They find a green area with a bench nearby, in front of a flowerbed overflowing with pink and yellow plants. They each steal bites of each other’s waffles, in between peals of laughter and unfaltering conversation. Alli tells Jake about growing up in Louisiana and college at NYU, about how she dedicated fourteen years of her life to ballet before an ankle injury stole her dream away from her, about the three stray cats she’s adopted. Jake tells Alli about his love for _Die Hard_ , about how he always wanted to be a detective, about Graham Crackers the turtle. He does not tell her that he spent a whole year living in a fog, about how sometimes he wakes up thinking that it’s all a dream, and has to spend five minutes getting his breath back when he realises that this is his life. He misses out the parts where he jolts awake from nightmare after nightmare in which Amy has died, but when he wakes he realises that he feels exactly the same as the nightmare.

The conversation on the bench lasts for a full hour before Alli realises she’s late to meet up with her friends. She keys Jake’s number into her phone and then texts him a pancake emoji so that he has hers too. Jake drives home with her smiling face stuck in his mind, pushing away the guilt. It’s ok to move on. He knows that. And he’s trying not think of it as moving on, because all he did was have an hour long conversation with a pretty girl on a bench over waffles, but he can’t deny that he _likes_ her. That he’s looking at her in a way that he hasn’t looked at anyone in for a long time. Like he finally decided to look up from his sadness, and the universe is telling him he’s doing the right thing.

When he gets home, he kisses the tips of his fingers, and spreads them across the last remaining Amy picture in the apartment. It’s one of the two of them, pulling stupid faces on their way home from Shaw’s one night. It’s in a blue frame and it used to sit on the dresser in the bedroom, but now it’s buried in a drawer because he’s scared Rosa’s going to make him throw it out and he wants one last picture of her as his own. Just one last remnant of the life that was, the life that he thought would always be his.

He presses his fingers to the glass, his eyes recording every detail of her to memory, as if he hadn’t done that years ago. “Bye, babe,” he whispers.

He puts the picture back in the drawer, face down, and wonders if actually, he’s going to get through the other side of this after all.

 

**January 1st, 2020**

 

**Text message  01/01/20   00:06**

**Luis Santiago**

_Happy NYE. Hope it’s a good one. Don’t drink too much. Watch out for drunk calls from Anthony, he’s v. loud x_

 

**Text message  01/01/20   00:07**

**Anthony Santiago**

_HAp new yer sister_

 

**Text message  01/01/20   00:11**

**Cal (hospital Cal)**

_Happy New Year, Amy! I hope to see lots of more of you in 2020 :) xxx_

 

Amy spends New Year’s back in Chicago, having spent almost a week at her parents’ house over Christmas. Last Christmas had been the worst of her entire life, spending it holed up in her childhood bedroom, finally coming out after a conversation through the closed door with Luis, and she’d celebrated New Year’s Eve by falling asleep at ten p.m., and then she’d decided to accept the Chicago job, and somehow started to regain a sense of normality in a city far away from home.

She rings in 2020 with her new friends. Not Cal, because their relationship is still kind of new and he’s in Minnesota with his parents and three brothers at the lodge that his grandparents and extended family had built with their bare hands. But on her first day at work she’d been introduced to Detective Katie Monroe, and they’d become friends quickly on account of Amy commenting on Katie’s impeccably organised desk and neatly stacked array of binders. Amy’s never met someone as similar to her as Katie, and soon finds herself at Katie’s apartment, drinking too much wine, and pouring her heart out about Jake. About the pressure of it all. Of the high profile job and the wedding planning and the incomplete targets laid out by the Life Plan. At some point, it all got to be too much. Katie is the youngest detective at the precinct, and while she may not have had the same life experiences as Amy, she knows all about what can happen when you’re put under too much pressure. She’s no Rosa, but she’s a good listener and she knows the right words to say to make Amy feel a little better, and Amy does the same for her, so it isn’t long before Amy fits easily into Katie’s friend group.

Katie’s lived in Chicago since college, so she knows all of the best places to spend New Year’s Eve. They start with a Tapas Fusion restaurant, the food piled high on platters in rainbow hues. (Amy tries her hardest not to think about bringing Jake here. That was her default for most of 2019, wandering into a place that she knows Jake would like, and deciding that she needs to bring him there, wanting to see his expression of delight or wonderment or fascinating disgust, dependent on what it is. It’s difficult because she spent years of her life, before that, visiting places with him, so it takes time for her to shake that particular frame of mind.) Somehow, they end up on a rooftop bar at two in the morning. It’s decked out in neon lights and yellow armchairs, overlooking the endless stretch of dark water that is Lake Michigan. The side of the rooftop nearest the bar is busy, heaving with life and laughter and tears and the hopes and dreams of tens of people for the brand new, shiny, blank slate of a year. The other side of the rooftop is quieter, a few couples curled into armchairs together, bringing about the weird uncomfortable feeling in Amy’s stomach that she doesn’t have a name for yet. She’s been waiting for it to go away, because surely the pain of a breakup can only last for so long, but so far it hasn’t shifted, not even when she’s with Cal.  

New Year’s Eve is a night humming with possibility. The possibility to shed off pieces of your life, to just cut them away and leave them behind. The possibility to pick up new things, to become someone new. Get a new haircut or move halfway across the world. Amy’s already become someone new. She got the haircut and she moved to the new city, took the new job, made the new friends, met the new guy.

She wonders, leaning on the railing to overlook the water on the quiet side of the roof, whether 2020 is going to be better. Whether she’ll start to really, properly feel like herself again. Or maybe that’s not a courtesy that life’s going to grant to her. It doesn’t matter that the right thing to do was to break up, to set two unhappy people free. It still hurt her. And it hurt Jake too, which hurts her a thousand times more than her own pain. She never meant for that to happen.

“What are you thinking about?” Katie asks, leaning next to her on the railing.

“2020. You think it’ll be a good one?” Amy wonders.

“Who knows,” Katie replies, looking out over the water. “I think as long as we go into it with the best of intentions, then at least we can say we tried,” she reasons. “How are things going with Cal?”

“They’re ok,” Amy shrugs. “He’s nice. But I don’t see myself _marrying_ the guy or anything.”

“Do you… do you think that’s a Cal problem, or a you problem?” Katie asks, as fireworks start to bloom in the sky over the water. The bright pops of colour reflect on the lake.

“What do you mean?” Amy knows very well what her friend means, but she doesn’t want to answer the question.

“I mean,” Katie stops, sighing. “I mean that you’re always distracted. Always look like you want to be somewhere else. I mean tonight, I guess that’s understandable. I’ve watched the ball drop in Times Square so many times but never been there for myself, so I guess I’d miss New York City New Year’s if I were you.” Katie stops talking, and Amy remembers the last New Year’s she spent out in New York, taking up residence in a booth at a bar she doesn’t remember the name of with Jake, Rosa, Gina, Charles, and Genevieve.

They’d watched loud groups coming and going, people hooking up in the corner, seen no less than eight people get thrown out for being too drunk. All of these people with different lives, just passing through theirs, and Amy knows that not one of the six of them would have traded their spots that night for anything.

“Do you ever think about going back? You know you could get a job back in New York, and I’d miss you a bunch. But you’re my friend, and I wanna see you happy,” Katie says softly, watching Amy closely.

“I’m happy here, Katie. It’s just a lot to adapt to, y’know?”

“Yeah. I get you,” Katie assures her. She holds up her champagne flute, the tiny bubbles rising to the surface and fizzing away. Amy’s got one too, and she holds it up to meet Katie’s. They clink together with the fireworks igniting the backdrop. “Here’s to 2020. And to new beginnings.”

“New beginnings,” Amy echoes.

Time ticks on. 2020 settles in.

 

**April 1st, 2022**

 

**Text message  04/01/22   13:01**

**Roro Diaaaazzz**

_Heard abt the prank. Sorry I doubted u but don’t ever try anything like that on me._

 

**Text message  04/01/22   13:14**

**Charles**

_HOW DID IT GO???_

 

Jake loves April Fool’s Day, except for the year when it didn’t seem like there was much funny in the world. He’s not the same person he used to be, but sometimes he thinks that this version of him is better. This isn’t quite the same version of him that existed before Amy left, but it’s not the sad, shell of a person that existed in the year or so after that, either. It’s not the version that Alli fell in love with, or the version that she fell _out_ of love with. This version is a Sergeant at Brooklyn’s eighty-fifth precinct, and he has a cool apartment and a scruffy stray cat that he sometimes feeds, and sometimes he goes on dates, and he spends the weekends with friends. And he’s got more ties in his closet than ever before.

 

Chunks of his life are the same though, like how they’ve always been. He keeps his fridge well stocked with orange soda and he’s still the owner of multiple massage chairs. He still plays pranks on April Fool’s. This April Fool’s is no exception, and Jake’s on his way into Manhattan at lunch time for day one of a police conference. He knows that Charles, Terry, and Captain Holt will be there too, and although he sees at least one of them most weekends, he’s looking forward to being together in a work context again. Jake’s smiling on the way out to his car because he just pulled off a prank on some of the most junior detectives that he’s been planning with Lieutenant Garcia for months. He knows that they’ll probably retaliate at some point, but it’s going to a hard prank to top.

He thinks about the conference as he makes his way there. Captain Holt’s giving a speech about successfully running a precinct tonight, and Terry’s helping out at one of the fitness workshops tomorrow. It’s three days for Jake to remember why he loves his job so much, as if he needed reminding.

Charles meets him the entrance, already carrying an NYPD tote bag from the exhibition area, waving at Jake as soon as he sees him. Charles is a dad of two now, and Jake feels some weird variation of pride at how far he’s come from being simply ‘Eleanor’s ex-husband’, or ‘Vivienne’s ex-fiance’. Jake’s happy for him, and sure, he had hoped that by now he’d be married, or at least in a loving, long-term relationship. And, admitting it only reluctantly to himself, he thought he’d be a dad by now, too. He’s learned a lot over these past few years, though, and one of the lessons he’s trying the hardest to stick to is not to dwell on things. Not to dwell on could-have-beens or should-have-saids. So he focuses his energy on being happy for Charles, happy that his best friend has got this beautiful, happy family. Jake’s got tens of dumb selfies on his phone taken with Charles’ kids, and Terry’s kids, and Gina’s kid. Even if he doesn’t have his own, he’s still got some in his life, along with a plethora of adults who love him.

“Was the drive ok?” Charles asks as soon as Jake is within earshot.

“Yeah. Pretty quiet actually,” Jake muses. He reaches Charles, and they enter the building together.

“Oh, I almost forgot! How was the prank? Did it work? Was McCall there?” Charles wants to know.

“The prank was great!” Jake grins. “McCall was five minutes late but we got him. Garcia even filmed it, so I’ll send it to you.”

“Yes!” Charles fist pumps in the air. “I knew you could do it, Jakey.”

“I knew I could do it too,” Jake says, high-fiving Charles. “Thanks for believing in me.”

“Any time.”

“Hey, where are Terry and Holt?” Jake asks, looking around the packed lobby.

“Practicing Holt’s speech somewhere. I said we’d meet up with them in thirty minutes,” Charles explains, raising his voice over the din of police officers.

“What do you wanna do till then?”

“We could go get you a bag of swag?” Charles offers, shaking his own. Jake’s slightly put off by the fact that Charles is doing his ‘suggestion eyebrows’, but agrees nonetheless.

Jake’s only been to this particular conference once before, because it’s generally for officers in more senior positions than their usual Cop Con, but it really follows the same pattern. There’s an exhibition hall, a keynote speech, workshops, talks, and last year there was even a late night party in someone’s hotel room. The party stung a little, because it summoned long buried memories of the Cop Con where Amy had thrown up in a pillowcase, Jake holding her hair back, where his shirt had caught on fire and they’d lost Captain Holt’s laptop. All memories like that sting a little. At first, they had been bright white burning agony, but now they just sting. Sea water in a papercut.

When they leave the exhibition hall twenty-five minutes later, both of them are carrying bags filled with business cards, brochures, free pens, coupons, and various other assorted items. They’re both laughing at some stupid joke one of the PR guys had told them when they had visited the PR booth, and Jake’s turning his attention to the conference welcome dinner. Last year, there had been a fancy version of chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks, so he’s holding out hope that they’ll have some again this year.

That’s when he hears it. The voice. Her voice.

He’d know it anywhere. He could pick a single word out of an audio file a thousand minutes long. Jake stops dead in the middle of the hallway, causing someone behind him to walk straight into him. It doesn’t matter, though, because he just needs to work out where the voice is coming from. He doesn’t have a plan for what he’ll do when he figures it out. When she first left, he always had a plan for exactly this situation. At first, he was going to beg for her to come back with everything in his being, and then he changed his mind and decided that he was going to tell her exactly how much she hurt him. He was going to pour his heart out and then walk away, never looking back. Some time later, he decided that that was the worst idea he’d ever had, that he should ask for her to take him back after all. Finally, he decided that he just didn’t care. That if he saw her on the street, he’d walk right past like she was just another stranger. Because she may as well have been. He thought he knew her, but obviously not if she could just leave like that.

“Jake? What is it?” Charles is right in front of him, his voice concerned.

“You hear that?” Jake asks, wondering for a second if he’s truly gone insane. If he was lying to himself that he’s ok now. Maybe his subconscious is just trying to do him a kindness, tricking him into thinking that she came back.

“Hear wh-” Charles starts, but then he freezes too.

“You hear it, right?” Jake whispers. The traffic in the hallway has lessened.

“Is that… is it…?”

“You can say her name, Charles. She’s not a demon, it isn’t gonna summon her.”

“I _know_ ,” Charles hisses. They both stand still, trying to pinpoint the source of her voice.

Jake figures it out first. There are doors leading off of the hallway on both sides, and three of those doors are propped open. Jake figures out that it’s the door at the very end of the hallway, to their right, and heads towards it. Each session has a board with the name of it and the speakers, positioned just inside the door, which at the moment, Jake has never appreciated more. He takes the tiniest step into the room, heart beating so fast that he thinks he might not make it back out alive. There’s no method to this, it’s just Jake’s eyes scanning the information board and hoping that, if Amy Santiago truly is in this room, she doesn’t see him before he sees her. If at all. He isn’t sure he wants her to see him at all. Or that he wants to see her. He could turn back around and walk out of this room right now and it would be over. But how would he cope with the aftermath of that? How could he deal with it, knowing that he maybe missed his only chance to say something to her.

The board says that it’s a talk about women in policing, and the first three speakers are names that Jake doesn’t know. He skims them quickly, and then underneath that is a note saying that two of the speakers will be joining them by video call. Those names are Katie Monroe, and Amy Santiago. There’s a split-second thought running through Jake’s head, that this is the guys in his precinct getting their revenge for the prank this morning. He shakes it off, realising that no one in their right mind would think that this was an appropriate prank. This is just a consequence of Amy being a kick-ass police officer. He knows she’s a lieutenant now, saw people congratulating her on her Facebook page. (He still felt proud of her. He hated her for making him feel proud of her, but he knows it’s her dream, and for a long time he was her biggest cheerleader. He’s got all of this useless information stored away in his mind about her. He wants to transfer it all to the recycle bin, like the one on the desktop of a computer, but he’s stuck with it. He’s stuck passing her birthday and wondering if she’s having a good time, stuck wondering if she’s watching the Harry Potter movie marathon every time they show it on fourth of July weekend or over Halloween or at Christmas.)

Amy’s on a large screen at the front of the room, her face five times its ordinary size. There’s a younger woman to her left, her dark hair in a braid which she’s playing with nervously. Jake panics that she’ll see him for a second, all the way from Chicago, but then reasons that the webcam likely isn’t going to be pointing to the back of the room, behind the information board he’s peering over. His blood is icy in his veins as his eyes land on hers. She’s moving on the screen in real time, answering a question from the panel moderator, hand gestures and all. She looks good, hair tucked behind her ears (it’s still short. It suits her), lips painted in the shade he knows is her favourite. He’s seen pictures of her online, but it’s different here. She’s smiling easily, and chatting, like she could be standing across from him. She stills her hands, folding them in front of her, and that’s when he sees it. That’s when he sees the thing that makes him react the way he did on the day she left. Pushing the air from his lungs, constricting his throat, stopping the planet.

It’s a ring. He can’t see the details from here, but it’s a gold band, and he thinks that there are flecks of green in there somewhere. He doesn’t need any sort of details to know what it means. What it means is a hundred stab wounds to the chest. What it means is a bullet shooting directly through his heart. It means that she’s moved on. Well and truly. And he _knew_ she’d moved on, knew she had a boyfriend, and he’s probably smart and kind and caring and loving. (and God, he _hates_ himself, but he hopes that the new boyfriend is all of those things. All of them and more. In all of the universes, Amy Santiago deserves someone who ticks all of those boxes. Even if, in this one, it isn’t him.)

He didn’t know about the ring, though. About the ring and its connotations. There hadn’t even been a whisper of that, not between his friends, or online. After they got engaged on the rainy rooftop, both of them had, very literally, shouted it from the rooftop. Linked the fingers together, tipped their heads back into the downpour, and exclaimed it to the world. Jake wonders what’s different this time. A tiny question in the back of his mind asks whether it’s because of him.

Something about their old life hadn’t been enough for Amy. And he doesn’t know what, but now he’s convinced that she was just with the wrong guy. That she was just with Jake, when she could have picked anyone else in the world and been happy about it. She’s smiling on the screen, fiddling with the gold band absently, and all of the anger and the sadness and the questions are bubbling back up inside of Jake. How can she be so happy? How is it fair that she can be this light, and he can’t? He’d never wish _anything_ but happiness on her, despite the way it makes his chest constrict that it isn’t him making her laugh like that anymore ( _“How did you know he was the one?” “He makes me laugh.”_ ), but why can’t _he_ be that light, too. What must it be like to have survived their relationship without the burden of the world getting left on your shoulders?

He feels a hand on his shoulder. It’s Charles, a sad smile on his face.

“I don’t get it,” Jake tells him, voice low in the quiet room. Amy’s stopped talking now, listening to one of the speakers present in the room. “Why’d I get stuck in the universe where we don’t end up together?” He’s researched the multiverse theory, after winding up watching National Geographic one night, right after the breakup, when everything was numb.

He’s researched it and decided that this just isn’t the universe for him. That there have to be an infinite number of universes out there where they’re happy together. Where they both tried harder, loved more fiercely, fought for each other. Ones where they’re married, ones where they’re parents, ones where they’re the purest kind of happy. It’s those thoughts that have haunted him ever since, even now, when he’s doing well. He’s less stuck on the ‘what-if’ and more on there ‘where-if’. The only explanation is that somebody stuck him in the wrong universe.

 

**January 20th, 2021**

 

**Text message  01/20/21   07:21**

**Katie Monroe**

_Are u free tonight?_

 

**Text message  01/20/21   07:29**

**Amy S**

_No, sorry, Cal’s taking me to dinner._

 

**Text message  01/20/21   07:32**

**Katie Monroe**

_Oooooooh_

 

**Text message  01/20/21   07:38**

**Amy S**

_I am a senior officer, Monroe_

 

**Text message  01/20/21   07:40**

**Katie Monroe**

_lmao_

 

When Jake had proposed, there had been an air of anticipation filling up the whole precinct. Amy had spent the whole day thinking that it was because it was Halloween, and the annual heist was going on. (Every year at Halloween she remembers the buzz of precinct when the Halloween Heist was going on, the thrill of trying to win, uncomparable to anything else she’s experienced. She’ll dream about Halloween Heists that could have been, would have been, should have been, until the end of her days). She’s sure that she was the last person in the whole precinct, maybe even the whole block, to know about the proposal. It wasn’t until the rain started to pour, till she climbed to the top of the building and emerged on their roof to damp flowers and Jake on one knee that she realised. It was the happiest day of her entire life, and try as she might, she can’t think of anything that could top it.

Cal proposes on an uneventful January day. He doesn’t seem nervous, like Jake did, and there’s no air of anticipation to speak of. He made a reservation at a fancy restaurant a couple weeks before, but that isn’t unusual. Cal likes to spend money at fancy restaurants for birthdays and Christmas dinners and when one of them has done something good at work. Amy figures that’s what it is, one of Cal’s Good Days At Work dinners. When she asks, he mumbles something unintelligible and then goes back to the book he’s reading, so Amy doesn’t press him for more. She just digs through her closet for a pretty dress and puts on her makeup. There’s a ten minute window in between Amy being ready and Cal being ready, so she sits on one of the steps leading down to the front door, flicking through emails on her phone, and then turns to a new app.

Something happened in New York. She reads the headline, proclaiming six dead, and is sure that she can feel her heart stop. Feel her chest seize up, her lungs pause in their pursuit of oxygen, the blood idling in her veins. It’s happened before, of course. Every time something happens in the city where half of her damn soul still resides, it’s like a little piece of it chips away. There’s a tether binding her to Brooklyn, binding her to the friends who were once her family, the building that became her second home, the man she was going to marry. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever stop feeling like a part of it. Maybe if everyone she once knew moved away, and they bulldozed down the Nine-Nine’s building. But even then, probably not.

There was a gas explosion in Queens, that’s what killed the six people, and injured twelve more. Probability tells her that there’s no way in hell that it was anyone she knew. Math is safe and reliable and this time it’s on her side, so she pushes the worry away, into a box in her mind, with all of the other worries that she’s saving for a rainy day.

She’ll keep checking, and sooner or later they’ll release the names. Then she’ll be able to breathe again. (The alternative, she knows, is to call one of them. She still has their numbers, and there’s no way _all_ of them will have changed them. No way _all_ of them will have blocked her, although she wouldn’t blame them if they had. But she can’t call them. It’s not an even the shadow of an option.)

“You doing ok?” Cal calls down the hall. Amy hears the jangling of keys.

“Yeah,” Amy replies, absently scrolling to the comments section of the article. She hears a door close and Cal’s footsteps going closer. “There was a gas explosion. In Queens,” she tells him.

“There was?” She can hear him pulling a jacket on, picturing him lifting his heavy grey coat from the hooks where all of their jackets and scarves and hats reside. “Is anyone hurt?”

“Six people died. More injured.” At the bottom of the page is a map, showing exactly where the explosion was. It’s not a street she frequented, but she knows it.

“That’s terrible. Not… not anyone you knew?” He taps her shoulder, reaches for her hand, helps her to her feet. He’s asking all of the right questions, but not in the right way. She can tell his mind is elsewhere. It often lingers at the hospital, with a baby who isn’t doing so well or a teenager who’s going for a big surgery in the morning.

“I don’t think so. It was Queens,” she explains.

They’re still holding hands as they walk out of the door, but Amy can’t help but think that holding hands with Cal is an inconvenience, not a comfort. Their fingers knit together, Cal’s a few shades darker than her own, his nails bare, hers painted dark blue for the dinner. She hates herself for constantly comparing Cal with Jake, as if he’s the bar which every other guy in the world is going to fail to meet. But Jake used to rub soothing circles along her thumb with his own. Sometimes it feels like there’s a permanent mark on the metacarpal bone in her thumb, from all of those times his thumb took its place there.

Cal drives to the restaurant, Amy folds her hands together in her lap, thinking about the busy day she’s going to have at work tomorrow. Her captain here is a woman, Captain Finney, and she’s stern, and a little cold, but she’s a damn good captain. That’s one of the reasons why Amy decided to take the job in Chicago, because of everything she’s heard about Marie Finney. The job offer in Chicago was the breeze knocking down the first domino which led her to now, and she’s asked herself a thousand times if it was worth it. She still doesn’t have a concrete answer, but she’s here now, and she’s trying her best. That’s what her parents always told her to do, before a big test. She remembers exclaiming that her best isn’t always good enough, aged eleven, exhausted from staying up studying all night, and her dad pulling her towards him and looking into her eyes and telling her that her best would always, always, always be good enough. That her best was all that would ever be promised to her.

It’s a restaurant they’ve been to before. It’s got a pianist in the corner, playing on the shiniest piano Amy’s ever seen, and there’s a koi pond in the lobby. A waitress in a black dress introduces herself as Margot, and shows them to a table with a glinting bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice in the centre. Cal orders oysters for both of them, and when they arrive on a silver platter, Amy’s brain flashes her back to the night when she was called Dora, sharing oysters with Jake across the little table, trying not to knock her toes with his underneath it.

“So how was work?” Amy asks Cal, pouring herself another glass of champagne. Cal doesn’t know about the Santiago drunkenness scale. That’s her own little secret, a part of old, New York Amy. A part reserved for the people who knew that version of her.

“Pretty good,” Cal nods. “Lily’s big surgery’s tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? That came around quick,” Amy comments. Lily is a five-year-old with a heart problem, and she’s been a regular at the hospital for three years, including four surgeries already. Cal isn’t a surgeon, but he’s had a big part in her treatment. He gets more invested in the kids than he maybe should, and Amy loves that about him, even on the days where her feelings are so confusing that she can’t see straight.

“Yeah. She’s a tough kid,” Cal nods.

It happens during dessert. Amy’s eating strawberry cheescake and Cal tiramisu. One second they’re chatting happily, and then he’s pushing his chair back, and Amy’s first thought is that he’s going to the bathroom, but then he’s moving around to the side of the table and sinking slowly towards the ground.

“What are you _doing_?” She hisses, eyes darting wildly around, willing him to stand up before anyone notices.

“Amy Santiago,” he reaches for her hands, like he’s just trying to pull her up again. But he’s on one knee now and it’s too much. Much too much. She wants to slam her chair backwards and walk right out of the door. “I know that, technically, we haven’t really been dating for long. But I knew as soon you kissed me for the first time that we were meant to be.” He’s looking up at her with his dumb face full of love, and Amy stills, focussing in on him. His hair’s flopping into his eyes in the way that it does when he lets it grow out too long. The way that makes her smile endearingly at him and push it back, pressing a kiss on his forehead in its place.

“Cal?” He’s stopped speaking. He’s looking around, and then the staff are coming towards them with a fresh bottle of champagne and a selection of chocolate strawberries.

“Right on cue,” he laughs. “Amy, I love you. And I don’t want you to ever have to leave my life. You’re beautiful, and intelligent, and caring, and funny. And your organisational skills are flawless.” Amy smiles at him then, because maybe he does know her. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So, will you marry me?”

She stops panicking, starts thinking rationally. She’s not always the best rational thinker, but right now she has to be, because there’s a restaurant full of people watching her. She’s doing the stupid thing again where she compares Cal to Jake, which is one thing that she knows _isn’t_ logical, because they’re poles apart. Cal’s… Cal’s too similar to her. She loved all of the things about Jake that were different. She loved that he proposed to her on their rooftop.

And maybe the differences were why, in the end, they didn’t work out. Amy loves Cal. She’s tried not to stop and analyse her feelings too deeply. That would likely make things more complicated. This thing with Cal has been eyes closed, head first, can’t lose ( _“America needs me.”_ ). But there’s love in there. That’s one of those jumbled up emotions. That’s got to be enough. (That’s what she’s been told, love is enough, love is all you need to make something work. She didn’t believe it last time. She doesn’t stop to consider that she _still_ loves Jake, or that he could _still_ love her. That this thing she’s considered dead for a while could actually, implausibly, still work if the theory about love being enough is true. The love never left. Something else changed. She tells herself that _this time_ it will be enough.)

Amy plaster a smile onto her face and says yes.

 

**September 2nd, 2021**

 

**Text message  09/02/21   16:01**

**Alli**

_Can u pick me up Starbucks for after yoga plz? Xoxo_

 

**Text message  09/02/21   16:04**

**Jake <3 <3**

_Will cost u!_

 

**Text message  09/02/21   16:05**

**Alli**

_I can deal with that ;) xoxo_

 

**Text message  09/02/21   16:07**

**Jake <3 <3**

_Noice. X_

 

Jake doesn’t mean to start the conversation that ends things. He doesn’t _seek out_ the baby section in Target. It’s just that he needs new socks, because he’s pretty sure he was cursed as a child to never be able to keep a matching pair of socks for longer than a month. He goes to Target whilst Alli is at a yoga class, fights with himself about buying a nerf gun, gets lost in women’s wear, and then eventually stumbles across the socks. Alli likes his odd socks, calls them cute, but he’s going to the funeral of some high ranking officer in three days, and will need to wear his uniform. Should anyone look at the small gap between the hem of his pants and the shined-up leather of his shoes, he doubts mismatched neons would come across as super professional. He spends a few minutes looking at the novelty socks, the ones with Spongebob and Harry Potter motifs on, before settling on a six-pack of plain black ones.

It’s on the way to the cash register that Jake stumbles across the object that will later be his downfall. It’s a pair of baby shoes. He walks past the baby clothes section, and there’s a rack full of tiny, circle-like shoes, ones that he can barely fit his thumb into. A tiny, soft blue pair catch his eyes, and he picks them up, holding them in his palm, unable to stop himself from breaking into a smile. Jake wants to be a parent. He wanted to be one with Amy, _so_ badly, but now there’s Alli, and he can imagine a tiny person, half him, half her. Her hair, his eyes. He finds himself talking to Charles and Terry about fatherhood more and more these days, and last week he emitted a small squealing sound when Terry was looking through old pictures of his girls.

It’s not that he’s putting off talking to Alli about it, it’s just that it hasn’t exactly come up in conversation. Alli’s nearly ten years younger than him, and Jake doesn’t know if she’s ever even thought about kids, but Terry points out that he needs to have this conversation with her, before they start to really plan their lives together. Jake isn’t sure how it hasn’t come up yet, they basically live together already. That wasn’t a consequence of commitment so much as Jake wanting an excuse to move out of his old apartment, of being reminded of Amy at every turn. He suggests moving into a new apartment so that they’ll be more space if Alli ever properly wants to move in with him, and she loves the idea, so he does. She’s got drawers of her own things there already, and a spare toothbrush that she props up beside his. He smiles at them when he wanders into the bathroom every morning.

Jake puts the baby shoes down, knowing that even if he does have the conversation with Alli and she wants to have kids right this second, the baby shoes are a bad idea. He settles on the socks and a pack of gummy bears, stopping by Starbucks for drinks on the way back to his car. Jake likes the multicoloured frappes and has been ordering them from the secret menu ever since he read a Buzzfeed article listing some of the best ones. Today he orders a new one, the cookie monster with extra whipped cream, and he gets Alli the soy matcha latte she always chooses.

“Thanks, honey,” she beams at him as he climbs into the car, handing her the drink. She calls Jake honey, and he’d never tell her but he’s endlessly relieved that she picked _honey_ instead of _babe_.

“Eight dollars please,” Jake holds his hand out towards her, pulling his seatbelt on with the other.

“ _Eight_? What’s the extra for?” Alli frowns, folding her arms.

“Service charge.”

“Sorry, Jake, but you’re a _terrible_ waiter,” Alli says, apologetically.

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t quit my day job?”

“Maybe not.”

Jake clips his seatbelt into place and then looks over at Alli. They both laugh, he kisses her on the nose, puts his drink into the cup holder, starts the engine, and drives away. It’s fun, and simple, and Jake’s smiling into the September sunshine as he drives back to his apartment.

It’s later that he brings up the shoes, and by extension, the whole _baby_ conversation and its associated complications. They cook a risotto together, Alli doing most of the work whilst Jake sits on the countertop and stirs the pot, and eat it sitting across from each other at the little dining table Alli got at Pottery Barn. Jake extracts his bright blue frappe from the fridge and starts drinking it once they’re done with dinner. He’d found out about it on a Youtube video, the reviewer calling it a ‘raspberry cinnamon taste explosion’. He’s about to tell Alli that he thinks it’s an accurate description, then he remembers the shoes.

“Oh my God, I saw the cutest thing ever today,” he begins, stirring the frappe.

“Was it that kitten video I shared?” Alli asks him.

“There’s a kitten video?”

“Yeah, I’ll send it to you,” Alli picks up her phone.

“What are they doing in it?” Jake asks, momentarily distracted. Alli loves kitten videos, and Jake knows for a fact that she’s got a folder on her Macbook filled with them.

“Climbing all over each other. You’ll love it,” she’s scrolling through something, eyes focussing on the small screen.

Jake can feel the sugar from the frappucino starting to enter his bloodstream already. “Baby shoes. That’s the cute thing I saw today. Tiny  baby shoes. In the shape of circles.” He takes another sip of his drink. Alli stops for a second, and then puts her phone down.

“Baby shoes?”

“Yeah. They were blue, and soft, and I could fit like six pairs in the palm of my hand,” Jake holds out his palm to demonstrate just how small the shoes were.

“That’s… that’s great, honey.” Alli’s avoiding his eyes.

“Oh no.” Jake knows that tone of voice, that struggle to avoid meeting his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Alli says, all too quickly. Jake sips the frappe. “Just… baby shoes. They’re not that cute. I just don’t get the whole thing about babies being cute, y’know?” She holds her hands up.

“Oh.” Jake feels his heart sinking into his feet. “So, I mean, maybe you don’t find babies as a general concept cute, but would you find your _own_ babies cute?” He winces, afraid of her response.

“My… my own babies?” Alli sounds like she might be choking, and Jake has to look twice to check that she isn’t.

“We’ve never had the conversation, but I… I just figured you’d want kids,” Jake shrugs. It’s not like he’s given it much thought. It’s just that he’s always known _he_ wants them, and if he thinks about it, maybe he’s been projecting onto her.

“Maybe we _should_ have had the conversation?” Alli suggests, leaning back in her chair, looking down at her hands, fidgeting in her lap.

Jake pushes his drink away from him, suddenly finding the taste sickly sweet, the cinnamon overpowering. “Well, you’re always saying there’s no time like the present.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Alli shoots back at him, her words painted with a vicious edge.

“Nothing, Alli, I’m… It doesn’t matter,” Jake sighs.

He isn’t sure that he has enough energy left in his body for another one of these conversations. To be another half of two people who want different things. Who can’t be happy together. Who can’t be happy apart.

“Jake,” Alli sighs too. “Jake, we’re adults. This baby thing… you’re right, we haven’t talked about it. But we should.” Her voice is calmer now, more rational. She shifts in her seat, pulling her legs up and resting her chin atop her knees.

“What is there to talk about?” He’s scared about what talking about it means. They’ve got a good thing going, a routine, an almost shared home, a life. He can’t face the overwhelming, swamping, draining sadness again.

“Well, we’re not just having fun. We’re… I could have stayed in this thing for the long haul.” Her voice is even quieter now, eyes on her knees.

Jake swallows, mouth getting that dry feeling again. “Could have?”

“I just… what’s the point. What’s the point of staying together if we’re just going to break up further down the road because we want different things? I’m never going to want kids, Jake.”

“I could… we could just not have them,” Jake suggests, half-heartedly. Desperately.

“That isn’t a solution. This isn’t something we can compromise on, honey.”

“So, what? We just break up?” He throws his hands into the air in exasperation. Alli bites her lip.

“We have to. We owe it to ourselves.”

So they do.

But it isn’t what Jake expects. It’s helping Alli to pack her things, hugging her goodbye, and watching her drive away. It’s a strange feeling of not being sure what to do next. Of sadness, but the kind he knows won’t last forever. Instead of sitting in an empty apartment, he calls Rosa, and there’s a Nora Ephron event at a movie theatre that she likes, so he puts on a jacket and goes.

Rosa buys him ice cream, they watch two movies, she makes him laugh.

“I never liked her anyway,” Rosa tells him, as they leave the theatre that night.

“Maybe she wasn’t so perfect,” Jake shrugs, looking up at the night sky, the flashing lights of planes overhead.

He used to do that a lot. He used to want to drive to the airport and get a ticket to Chicago. He hasn’t wanted to do that for a long time, but he does right now.

“You don’t seem so bad this time,” Rosa comments.

“I… don’t think I am. I don’t feel like the world’s gonna end, anyway,” he says, his tone joking. But Rosa was there when he felt like it. She was there to help pick up the pieces.

Jake calls his mom the next morning, tells her that Alli left, tells her that he’s ok. He knows he scared his mom before. He remembers her calling him every single day to check up on him, bringing him food to make sure he ate properly, taking him on walks or to the movies or to the mall, just to get him out of the house on his days off work.

It’s not like Jake isn’t sad. He is, of course. His life’s changing before him once again, and yet another person that he thought he’d be spending the rest of his life with has left. But he’s going to be ok this time. This time, the idea of starting fresh, a blank page which he’s going to fill up with adventures with somebody new, is sort of exciting.

 

**November 17th, 2023**

 

**Text message  11/15/23   09:42**

**Pickfords Shipping Co.**

_Thank you for choosing Pickfords Shipping. Our team will arrive at the address: 12 Brosnan Grove, Chicago, IL between 0900 and 1100 hours on November 16th 2023. We guarantee to deliver your items by 1800 hours on November 17th 2023, at the address: Apt. 34, 106 Bay St., Brooklyn, NY. Please call 312-951-0976 to change your booking._

 

**Text message  11/17/23   08:30**

**Amy S**

_Katie, I’ll miss you! I’ll let you know when my flight lands. Thanks for a great few years. You’ll be passing the sergeant's exam before you know it. Look me up if you’re ever in New York._

Cal and Amy break up. This time, it isn’t because of a job in a new city. This time, it isn’t Amy standing in the doorway with tears flooding her eyes, uttering apologies until she feels like she’s going to throw up. This time, she’s the one who’s left behind. It’s a similar scenario though, as fate would have it. It’s early October, it’s Cal sitting down with her, holding her hands, and telling her that he’s been thinking. And Amy knows those words aren’t good. Her six-year-old nephew would know those words aren’t good. One of Cal’s long-term patients had passed away a few days before, a little boy named Ethan, who had only been seven, and Amy knew that it was hitting him hard, thought that it was maybe something to do with that. And it was, in a way, because Ethan’s passing had jolted Cal into realising that life’s too short. Much, much too short, and bumpy, and uneven. And that if you don’t grab it with both hands, you’ll suddenly be old, looking back at life through the lens of your memories and wishing you had done so much more. Feeling every missed opportunity like a punch in the gut. And Cal doesn’t want that. He’d done spates of volunteering in third world countries years ago, right after med school, but a friend of his is flying to the middle east to work with Doctors Without Borders, and Cal’s decided that he wants to go too. He speaks four languages, he’s a gifted doctor. He can make a difference. He’s going to be gone a year, minimum, and he doesn’t know what’s going to happen after that, but something inside him has snapped to all of the injustices in the world and he’s made up his mind.

Amy doesn’t stand in his way. She’s proud of him, and they both cry a little, once again for the could-have-beens, should-have-beens, would-have-beens. But she’s proud of him, and she’s got her own dreams and aspirations to achieve too. They agree to break up, and they pack up Cal’s things and put them into storage. Amy drops him off at the airport and pulls him close, feeling his heart beating in his chest, willing him to be safe. Letting the what-ifs wash over her for just a minute. It’s a sad day. It isn’t soul crushing. It isn’t all consuming.

Maybe the universe is on her side, because less than a week after Cal leaves, Amy hears about an opening for a lieutenant back in Brooklyn, at the six-three. Chicago has started to lose some of its magic, never really felt like home. If she goes back to the NYPD now she can make captain in a couple years, command her own precinct back home in New York like she always wanted to do. And without the tether of Cal, without the excuse of routine, there’s nothing standing in her way.

She applies, without really having made up her mind, sure she’ll lose out to someone better suited anyhow.

But then she somehow secures the job, and they want her to start as soon as she can, and she’s sorting out all of her out-of-state transfer documents and putting it all in writing, and trying to find a new apartment (she sends three of her brothers to go and scout out places she finds online, and she’s so glad she does because a beautiful apartment she finds online was using old pictures in the listing, and Manny calls her having found two dead raccoons in it). Then all that’s left to do is tell everyone, and that makes her feel guilty because they’re all a little sad and a little mad that she didn’t tell them she was planning to leave. That’s just it though, this is one big life change that Amy _didn’t_ plan for. It’s terrifying, but exhilarating too. A brand new adventure.

Amy’s flight lands at JFK at eleven in the morning, and the confusing mixture of angst and nerves and excitement is not unlike the way she felt on the day she got her college acceptance letter in the mail. She hasn’t been back, not into the city itself, since the day she left it for the Chicago job. It’s late autumn, and it’s a cold one this year. Amy felt the bite in the air in Chicago and she feels it even more acutely in New York, the second she steps out of the plane into the open air, down the steps onto the tarmac. She’s missed New York at this time of year though, thinking of it with a kind of longing that she doesn’t have a name for, can’t really explain. But it’s after Halloween, which despite everything, she never really grew to love (besides the heists, of course, which she’ll treasure forever), and the whole city is fighting against the cold together, challenging it with decorations and twinkling lights and the smell of cinnamon. Waiting for her bags at the luggage carousel, a new realisation hits Amy. She’s in the same city as Jake. She could jump in a cab right now and go to his apartment. The only thing that would stand in her way would be the fact that she isn’t totally sure where he lives. But she’s a police lieutenant, she could figure it out. She doesn’t though. Jake’s moved on with his life, she’s sure, and doesn’t need her to dredge up the bad memories. She’s just going to hope that he’s happy, that he’s living a good life.

Luis picks her up from the airport, and she hasn’t seen him since last Christmas when she bought Cal back to her childhood home to spend the holiday (the holiday, for them, lasted a full two-point-five days before duty dragged them back to Chicago). She can’t believe it’s been almost a whole entire year since she’s seen his face in person. Yet another reason she’s happy to be back - she can see her family more often. Luis brings Lissa to the airport, Amy’s six-year-old niece, and she hardly even knows her because of how little she’s seen her family since moving.

The three of them head to Amy’s new apartment, and it’s not an exact match for the pictures, but Amy loves it all the same. And there’s no dead raccoons in it. It’s soft edges and pastel shades and big bay windows which Amy borders with cheerful yellow curtains. They’ve got hours to wait for all of her stuff to arrive, having received a text message giving her an hour-long slot for it to arrive in, so they go and get slices of pizza and pumpkin spice lattes, eating at the window seat of a bustling pizzeria in a busy street. The sky is patterned with grey tones, the streets already piled with the slush of recent snowfall, but it’s _so_ good to be back. The uncomfortable feeling that she’s been living with for the best part of five years, the part that settled into her stomach, and she convinced herself that it would stay there forever, is gone. Sometimes, Amy thinks, you just need to come home.

When they get back to Amy’s apartment, Lissa raids the mailbox, handing Amy a stack of papers, only a quarter of which are actually addressed to her. There’s some works things in there, things that they haven’t emailed her for whatever reason, and one of them contains more details about her new precinct. She’s never known much about the six-three, not having much time to find out any information on it between deciding to apply for the job and catching her plane today. It’s been a whirlwind. One of the pieces of paper lists everyone she will have command over. Including the precinct’s sergeant. One Sergeant Rosa Diaz.

\--

It’s almost thirty hours later that Amy decides she has no choice _but_ to go over to Rosa’s. It’s not like she hadn’t thought about that, about going to see all of them (all but one. She can’t do that). The thing is that she doubts very much that they’ll want to see her. Not after doing that to Jake. If one of her friends had left the other like that, she wouldn’t want to see them either. But now they’re going to be working together, seeing each other every day (her heart says it’ll be like it used to be. Her brain tells her, correctly, that they can never go back to that.), so it makes sense to go and see her and clear the air at Rosa’s place, rather than doing it publicly at work. That’s no way to make a first impression.

For some reason, Rosa’s address is printed beside her name on the information sheet they sent to Amy in the mail, along with the contact details of everyone else, detective or higher. Maybe it’s so that she can call them in the middle of the night if there’s a work emergency, or maybe someone at the six-three has the useful ability to tell the future, and knew that she’d need the address to go over there one night after her return from Chicago. Knew she’d be struggling for words to say on her way over there, rehearsing everything in her mind from how to ring the doorbell to the expression she should wear on face when (if) Rosa answers the door. There’s a whole ton of variables about this situation. Amy knows that Rosa lives with Gina and Gina’s daughter, Indigo, now, so what if one of them opens the door instead? That would warrant an entirely different facial expression.

Rosa and Gina’s house is small with a pointed roof, right at the end of a long street. Amy looked it up on Google Maps before coming out, just to know what she was looking for, finding a small Barbie sticker on the window and a polished number ‘137’ on the blue front door.

The mailbox is at the edge of the front yard, and for a second, Amy considers going home and writing a letter, putting it in the mailbox, leaving the rest of it up to Rosa. She doesn’t even know if Rosa knows that she’s the new lieutenant, or if her being in New York is going to be a complete surprise. But she’s here now, and this whole coming-back-to-Brooklyn thing has been done without her usual amount of over-thinking, so she knows that the best thing to do here is just to walk up to the door. To ring the bell. It takes her longer than she’d like, but eventually she’s standing in front of the door and she has pressed the doorbell and she’s waiting, mostly just wishing that Rosa’s front stoop would swallow her up.

Gina answers the door. She’s wearing all purple, hair braided messily around her face. Amy’s seen pictures online of her, of Indigo, of all of them, everyone she used to know. Of course. But it’s different to see her friend here, real, in the flesh. She looks a little more tired than Amy remembers her looking the last time she saw her with her own two eyes, a little older. But she’s still Gina. There’s a wolf pin on her sweater and she widens her eyes when she sees Amy in such a Gina-ish way that Amy wants to laugh for a second.

“No.” Is Gina’s first word to her. And then she closes the door.

Amy stands still for a second, unsure what to do next. She didn’t expect this. But she should have. _She’s_ the one who left. And if Jake was in as bad a way as Amy fears, then Gina probably had to pick up lots of the pieces. Had to try to fit them back together when they were broken and out of shape and never going to fit together in the same way they had before. Amy’s instinct is to walk away. Maybe try again another day. But she wants to get it over with, so, hesitantly, she rings the doorbell again. She has to ring three times before anyone answers, and hears hushed voices inside before the door is wrenched open.

“What. The _Hell_.” It’s Rosa this time, Gina standing right behind her and glaring at Amy with her arms folded.

Amy swallows, resists the urge to burst into tears. “Hi.”

Rosa is still very much _Rosa_. She’s still wearing all black, her hair still falls around her face in curls, and she’s still got the power to scare someone more with a single glare than any scary movie out there.

“Sorry, we don’t allow traitors into our home,” Gina announces. Amy’s remembering the time at the beach house, when Gina took care of six-drink-Amy.

She isn’t sure, right now, why she ever thought she needed to leave.  

“What the hell are you doing here?” Rosa asks, her eyes suspiciously scanning Amy from head to toe.   

“I’m… I’m back in New York.” So nobody told Rosa who her new lieutenant is. That answers one of Amy’s questions.

“You’re almost five years too late,” Gina says. They’re both looking at her expectantly. She has to say something useful now.

“I know… I know I hurt Jake. I know I shouldn’t have left like that, without a proper explanation. There’s no excuse for it,” she looks down at her feet. There’s a big green flowerpot filled with mint to her left. She wonders which one of them planted it. “But I’m back. I transferred back here and I’m going to be working at the six-three, so… I…” she looks back up at Rosa, hoping that she’ll take it from here.

“You better come in.” She stands aside after a few more seconds of staring Amy down. Gina throws Rosa a confused look, but doesn’t object when Amy steps in and begins to follow Rosa through the house.

The house is small and pretty and decorated with pictures of a smiling blonde child who Amy identifies as Indigo. In the pictures, they all look happy. There’s one on the mantle in the tiny living room, of Indigo and Rosa and Gina, Charles and his family, Captain Holt and Kevin, and Jake. And a blonde-haired woman with her arms around him. Amy can’t tear her eyes away from it.

“That’s Alli,” Rosa gestures at the picture. She sits down on the blue couch and Amy sits beside her. Gina doesn’t appear.

“Oh.”

“They broke up.” Rosa tells her, quickly.

Amy stubbornly ignores the rush of relief she feels when she hears that. “Is… is Jake ok?”

“Now. He’s ok _now_. But you’re back so I don’t know how he’s gonna be when he finds out.”

“He-” Amy begins

“You hurt him _so badly,_ Santiago. And not just him. All of us. Did you think about that?”

In truth, she hadn’t given it much thought. Not because she didn’t care, but because it didn’t occur to her that her leaving would hurt them. Leaving them hurt _her_ , but it was her own doing. It was expected, budgeted for, allowed.

“Why did you leave?” Is Rosa’s question.

Amy leans back against the arm of the couch and tries her best to answer. “Everything kind of got too much? The new job was great but it was so… there was this horrible case, the Blauman case. Did you hear about it?” Amy asks Rosa, who nods once. Amy still has nightmares about the Blauman case. “And I loved the job, but it was so intense, there was _so much_. Then the Nine-Nine got that high profile robbery case, so me and Jake were just always working. Always working, and barely sleeping, and barely seeing each other. We were out of sync again, only it was so much worse than before. It’s crazy how out of sync you can get when you’re living under the same roof. Way more than when you’re at a thousand miles apart.” Amy stops, worrying that everything she’s saying sounds stupid. She’s hearing herself now and wondering if, actually, it was all fixable.

“I made tea,” Gina’s back in the room, carrying cups of steaming, weird coloured liquid.  

“Did you use the new box?” Rosa asks, her voice softening.

“For _us_ , sure,” Gina stage whispers. Amy’s grateful all the same, accepting the drink and holding it in her hands like she’s afraid to let go. “Keep talking.”

So she does. Amy tells them about how, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t sure how to carry on. How she and Jake kept fighting all the time, how she’d felt terrible every day at the sight of the purple marks beneath the curve of his eyes, a result of the lack of sleep from working for half of the night and arguing the other half. How the captain at her precinct in Chicago had sought her out specifically for the job because of her work taking down Hawkins’ gang the year before. How she saw it as a way out.

And after that, Amy can’t stop talking. The story of all of it pours out of her until there are tears tracking their way down her cheeks. She tells them about everyone at her new precinct, about Katie, about passing the lieutenant’s exam. She tells them about meeting Cal and getting a happy flutter in her chest after feeling nothing but numb for so long, so of course she had to go on a date with him. She tells them about Cal’s patients, and how he proposed and it didn’t feel like fireworks but she said yes regardless. She talks about bumping into Terry at the Farmer’s Market, she talks about Jake, about missing him so fiercely she was sure she’d buckle under the weight of it. Finally, she tells them about Doctors Without Borders, about a longing for home so strong that she couldn’t do anything other than apply for a transfer, pack up her home, get on a plane.

When she’s finished, they’re both still looking at her, but it’s different now. Still angry. Still hurt. But there’s an empathy there, too. A particular understanding from Rosa, who knows that the job can overwhelm you at times, as little as they like to admit it. And both of them know what it’s like to find yourself out of sync with a person who you once walked in step with and couldn’t picture your life without.

“You could have talked to us, dummy,” Rosa says, as Amy pushes the tears from her face with the heel of her hand.

“You didn’t have to be so _dramatic_ about it and move to Chicago,” Gina chimes in, smiling a little sadly.

“Ok, I _know_ it was a stupid thing to do. But I’m back _now_. I need to make things right.” Amy declares, and she’s never been so sure of anything.

“Slow down there,” Gina holds up her hands. “What exactly does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Amy looks between the two of them, unsure how she’s supposed to make things right. There are a million things she could do. Maybe none of them would make things right, though. “I wanna apologise to everyone. _Everyone_. So that means I need to go see Jake.”

“You can’t do that,” Rosa tells her, with conviction.

“I have to do that, Rosa.” Amy insists.

“You’re not the one who had to call him when he wasn’t at work to check he got out of bed, or drive him home after way too many shifts in a row, or watch Die Hard with him four times a week to distract him, or…” She trails off.

“Or what?” Amy asks.

“It doesn’t matter,” Rosa shakes her head.

“Point is. You screwed up,” Gina says, with a jab of her finger in Amy’s direction.

“I know that. I _know._ God, I know. But I need to see him, I need to explain. I know my explanation doesn’t justify anything, but maybe it could… maybe there’ll be some kind of closure there?”

Rosa folds her arms again. “You gotta be careful,” she warms.

“I will.”

“ _Don’t_ hurt him again. Just don’t.”

“I’m not gonna do that.”

Rosa and Gina look at each other for a few seconds, communicating without words.

“Ok, then,” Rosa shrugs. “See him. See if it does anything for you. I don’t care. Just let us warn him, first.”

“Sure,” Amy agrees, eagerly.

“We’ll let you know when he’s ready,” Rosa says.

It doesn’t feel real, the thought that she’s going to see Jake soon. This whole evening has felt temporary, like a short visit before she heads back to her actual life in Chicago. Amy has to shake herself, remember that this is life now. This is the real thing. And soon, she’s going to get a shot at talking to Jake. It’s important that she doesn’t screw it up. She’s already planning the notes she’s going to write up tonight on her laptop, twelve point, double spaced. She only gets one chance at this. But she only got one chance at _this_ , too, at talking to Rosa and Gina again. It’s going to take a while, but the thought of being friends with them again doesn’t seem impossible anymore. She isn’t sure why she ever thought it was.

“Hey, Santiago?” Rosa stops her before she walks out of the door. “It’s good to have you back.”

Amy isn’t sure, but she thinks Rosa is almost smiling.

 

**December 20th, 2023**

 

**Text message  11/18/23   21:48**

**Roro Diaaaazzz**

_Tried 2 call u but I guess you’re busy. Call me when u get this msg._

 

**Text message  11/20/23   23:54**

**Peralta**

_Tell her I need time._

 

**Text message  11/20/23   23:58**

**Roro Diaaaazzz**

_k._

**Text message  12/01/23   22:09**

**Peralta**

_Is she different now?_

 

**Text message  12/01/23   22:40**

**Roro Diaaaazzz**

_Idk. Still a giant dork so not rlly._

 

**Text message  12/10/23   07:32**

**Peralta**

_I should just see her right?? Should I?? No?? Yolo??_

 

**Text message  12/10/23   17:59**

**Roro Diaaaazzz**

_I’m not gonna make the decision for u._

 

**Text message  12/18/23   19:16**

**Peralta**

_But am i still gonna like her?_

 

**Text message  12/18/23   19:19**

**Roro Diaaaazzz**

_Lol. Yes. 1000 push ups._

 

It takes Jake over a month, from the night he found out Amy was back and wanted to see him, to the night he agrees to it. He’d resigned himself to the fact that he would never really see her again. That he’d watch snippets of her life through word of mouth or on a screen. That he’d maybe see a picture of her in a wedding dress, or a ‘welcome to the world’ picture of a newborn. He was sure that, at the sight of each one of them, the familiar, looming feeling of sadness and bitterness would be there to greet him. An old friend.

When Rosa calls him and tells him that she’s here, sharing the same city as him again, he stops trying to fold his clothes, and moves to stand in front of the window. Because the lights are twinkling out there, and all he can think about is that that’s exactly what he’d done on the night she left, almost five years ago. And now she’s back, and everything in the city is crisp and cold and glittering, exactly like it was five years ago. But everything about the situation is different. Except for the fact that it involves two people who are a little broken around the edges.

Two days later, and there’s only one person Jake wants to see. Captain Holt is still at the helm of the Nine-Nine, still married to Kevin, still living in the same house that Jake’s always known him to live in. The only thing different is the dog. Cheddar had passed a few winters ago, and they’d all attended a small service in the Holt-Cozner backyard. Everyone cried, even Rosa, and two months later Charles had sourced a tiny corgi puppy with three legs. They’d named her Mabel.

Jake shows up at their house at ten p.m., after three hours of not knowing what to do with himself, and restlessly pacing his apartment and organising everything in his freezer. It’s the freezer thing that worries him, because he’s never, ever organised a freezer before in his life. Jake decides that he needs advice from the person whose advice he values the most, so he laces up his shoes and heads to Captain Holt’s.

Kevin answers the door, wearing pyjamas and clutching a yapping Mabel tightly. She might only have three legs, but she’s fierce, and she likes to make sure that everyone knows.

“I thought we were passed you showing up in the night, unannounced?” Kevin asks, frowning. Mabel wriggles, trying to escape.

“Come on, Kevin. You _know_ I’m like a son to you guys!” Jake protests.

Kevin sighs and stands aside to let Jake in. Kevin still frowns a lot when Jake’s around, but Jake knows that he could show up at three a.m., covered in blood, and Kevin would help him out. (He knows that because it happened, in the bad year. It wasn’t his own blood, and despite Kevin’s first question being whether Jake had murdered somebody, he hadn’t. It was just a case that went bad, at the wrong time. Just another thing that Jake couldn’t deal with at that time.)

The visit to the Holt-Cozner house is a useful one. Jake knows where they keep all of the ingredients for hot chocolate, so he makes cups for all three of them and then tells Captain Holt everything that Rosa had told him. Which wasn’t all that much, because although she claimed that Amy had told her everything, Rosa didn’t feel comfortable rehashing it all for Jake, so all he really knows is that her relationship broke down, that she’s back in New York and she’s going to be the lieutenant at Rosa’s precinct, and that she wants to see him.

Jake’s talked about all of this with Captain Holt before, of course he has. They talked about it before she left, and after she left, and during the bad year, and when Jake met Alli, and when Alli left. Sometimes Jake just talks until he’s run out of words whilst Captain Holt listens, and that in itself is helpful.

“Well, what do _you_ want to do?” Captain Holt asks, over an hour later after Jake’s talked through his feelings. Mabel is sleeping on his feet.

“I don’t know! You were supposed to tell me!” Jake replies, exasperated.

“I can’t do that.”

“That’s the same thing my mom said.”

“Your mother is right.” Captain Holt nods. “But here’s something you maybe haven’t considered.” He leans forward in his armchair. “You don’t have to decide right now. Or even this week. You two haven’t seen each other in five years. Another couple weeks or months won’t make a difference.”

Jake considers the idea. He’d been so focussed on trying to make a decision as to whether he wanted to see her or not _quickly_. He’s got to stick with this decision, he knows. He either decides to meet with Amy, and they set a time and a place and they both show up. Or he decides he doesn’t want to see her, and he says no more on the subject. It’s a decision he doesn’t want hanging over him for too long. But he also doesn’t want to make one that he’s going to regret.

“Maybe even take a couple days off of actively _thinking_ about it,” Captain Holt suggests. “Distract yourself. You’ll come back to it in a few days and maybe you’ll have your answer.”

“How am I supposed to distract myself from _this_?” Jake asks. It’s all he can think about, in every waking moment. And he’s dreaming about her, too.

“You always were good at getting distracted. You’ll figure it out,” he assures Jake. “But you’ll be ok, no matter the decision you make.” He reaches over to pat Jake on the shoulder.

Jake leaves thirty minutes and one more cup of hot chocolate later, feeling the weight of the decision lessen a little. When he gets home, he falls straight to sleep.

\--

He tries to distract himself for four whole days, working as much as he can, and when he’s not at work or asleep he makes sure he’s out of the house. He goes to the movies with Gina and Indigo, goes to dinner at the Boyle household and has a tea party with little Emilija Boyle. One evening, he even goes grocery shopping with his mom.

On the morning of the fifth day, he wakes up consciously thinks about Amy, about what his gut is telling him to do.

He’s pretty sure he wants to see her. But he takes until December eighteenth to commit to the decision. He does so with a text to Rosa, who promises to let Amy know. Jake had been sure that once the decision was made and the ball was in motion that he would feel better. That’s surely what’s supposed to happen once you make a life changing decision. You accept it, and you live with it, and it gets easier. That doesn’t explain why he’s back to pacing the floors right after sending the text message.

\--

When Jake sees Amy again, in the flesh, for the first time in very nearly five years, it isn’t as planned. They’re going to meet on the twenty-third. Jake and Rosa picked that date specifically (or rather, _Jake_ planned it, whilst Rosa listened) because it would give them time afterwards. Amy would be going to visit her family for a few days over Christmas, Jake knew, and they’d both be off work for a little, have enough time to take stock of things. He deliberately doesn’t pick the twenty-second, because that will forever be known as the day the world fell apart, and Jake doesn’t want this, whatever this is, to be associated with that. It will either go horribly and add to the day’s terribleness, or it will go well, and maybe, possibly, they’ll eventually be able to be friends again. And Jake doesn’t want that to start on the bad day.

But it happens on the twentieth. It happens when Jake’s walking home from the bodega, headphones in, Taylor Swift turned up loud. The street around his apartment block is pretty quiet, but there’s a figure standing on the sidewalk, head tilted up at the building. Jake doesn’t think much of it at first, figuring it’s someone waiting for a friend, but then he gets closer and catches sight of the wisps of dark hair, fluttering a little in the cold December breeze. His first thought is that her hair’s longer than it was in the last picture he saw of her. It brushes her shoulders now. His second thought revolves around the sheer terror that _Amy Santiago is standing in front of him._ Jake stops his music, pulls the headphones from his ears.

She hasn’t seen him yet. He could just turn and walk away, do a lap of the block, hope she’s gone when he gets back. He doesn’t know why she’s there, days early and in the wrong place. They’d agreed to meet at a bar, a nice public place where either one of them could just walk away if they needed to. Neutral ground. But now she’s here, and she’s wearing a red jacket he’s never seen before, and even in profile she’s so beautiful that it takes his breath away. He doesn’t want to think of her like that, because she broke his heart. But he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop. He never learned how.

Jake doesn’t get the chance to walk away, even if he’d wanted to, because Amy turns and begins to walk towards him, eyes to the ground. Jake stays still, mind flashing back to yet another Nat Geo documentary, this one about shark babies who still to avoid being seen by predators. And then he thinks about how weird he’s going to look if Amy takes her eyes off of the ground and looks up to find him just standing there, clutching a paper bag from the bodega. So he forces his feet forwards, palms sweating, heart hammering, brain processing a thousand disaster scenarios per second. They’re walking towards each other, almost colliding in the street, and then Amy looks up.

Amy’s eyes are beautiful too. Jake’s always thought so. He used to softly kiss her eyelids before she went to sleep at night, and sometimes they’d be having a conversation and she would look at him in a specific way, and Jake would get caught in those eyes.

Her eyes, as she looks at him now, in the dark street, underneath a flashing string of Christmas lights from the building beside them, are sad. Jake wonders if his are too. If they’re filled with all of the emotions he’s felt over her in the past five years. Of all of the questions. Of all of the words he wishes he’d said.

“Jake.” It’s the first word she’s said to him in five years.

He’s had dreams about this moment. About what he would say, how he would say it. The scenario has differed dependent on his mood. In his dreams, it’s always felt like a big moment. Something life defining. It’s felt like that in conscious thought too, but now it’s actually happening, and they’re just two people standing across from each other in the street.

“Santiago.” Jake’s aiming for joking, light-heartedness. Anything other than breaking down and telling her everything. Telling her he’s missed her. Telling her that he’s got a whole year of his life that he wouldn’t relive if you paid him a billion dollars.

“I wasn’t… I didn’t come on here on purpose,” she gestures back at his building.

He thinks about making a joke about alien abductions, but decides against it. “How do you get to an apartment block accidentally?”

“I kinda just started walking. My feet took me here,” Amy shrugs.

Jake studies her with his eyes, commits her to memory. If this goes badly, if she leaves again… if _he_ leaves… this will be the last time he ever sees her, really and truly. He maps the curve of her nose and the way the breeze is tangling her hair. He maps her teeth, the way she’s denting her bottom lip. He maps her lips, chapped from the cold. Her soft red jacket with large wooden buttons, her grey scarf, her denim jeans, her tan boots. Her fingernails are painted deep purple, but the polish is all chipping off. He wonders if she’s been biting her nails or if she’s just had the polish on for a while. There’s polish colouring her cuticles too, the way she always used to paint her nails, except for the times when Jake did it for her. Parts of Amy are just the same. Cut and pasted from their old life, their old selves. Parts of them are brand new. Maybe he’ll get to know them, learn them by heart, recite them from memory.

“Um… would you wanna go somewhere? With me?” Jake asks, glancing behind him in the general direction of a coffee shop he likes. It’s cosy and open till late and they do a great selection of muffins.

“Now?” Amy checks.

“If you wanna.”

Amy looks at him, and Jake wonders if she’s mapping him too. If they’ll know each other all over again sooner than he thought. They both start to walk, without any kind of acknowledgement. Somehow in sync, after years of being out of it.

\--

In the cafe, they talk. Jake orders hot chocolate, Amy orders herbal tea, and they sit across from each other in a booth, by the window. There’s only a handful of other people in the cafe, and there’s soft music playing against the backdrop of the kitchen noises.

“I know it isn’t worth anything,” Amy begins, sounding tired. Jake wonders if she’s been awake, worrying, too. “But I need to tell you that I’m sorry.”

This is something that he’s wanted to hear. Just those two words, said with feeling, like right now. The words make a lump form in his throat, because after everything they’ve done, Jake could shut his eyes and it could easily be five years ago.

“I’m sorry that I hurt you, Jake. I’m sorry that I didn’t just… just communicate with you. _God_ , where would we be right now if I’d just talked to you,” she laughs dryly and it sends shudders down Jake’s spine. He’s missed her laugh. He wonders if she’s wishing she could go back and do things differently as badly as he is, or if she’s happy it all happened. He’s too afraid to ask.

“I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to get you to stay,” is Jake’s response. He’s wished that he fought harder for her since that night.

They sit quietly for a minute, cupping their drinks. The air between them is heavy with unspoken things. With regrets and missed opportunities.

“I wish I had.” Amy says, so quickly that Jake almost misses it. “I’m thankful for what I’ve done, the people I’ve met. But I _wish_ that I had stayed.”

“I wish that, too,” Jake agrees. More silence. The song in the background changes to an Adele track.

“And I missed you. I don’t wanna pretend that I didn’t miss you.” Her eyes are swimming with tears now.

“I missed you too, Ame… Amy.” He’s itching to reach out and touch her. To make things ok again, like when he found her on the roof before the sergeant’s exam. “Why’d you go?” He says it. Asks the question that’s haunting him.

Amy tells him. She tells him what he guesses she told Rosa, and understands why Rosa couldn’t recount it. His heart aches when she tells him about leaving, and when she talks about the guy she almost married it makes him feel a little better to hear about it from her, rather than just reading about it online. Despite it all, Cal had made her happy, made her feel at home. He can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt, but he’s still glad that she had that. He’s happy to learn about her new friends, and hear the excited inflection in her voice when she tells him about work, and about all of the great stuff Chicago had to offer. Then she tells him about coming back. About the feeling of being home, and the uncomfortable feeling edging its way out of her bones. About being so happy to share the city with him again.

When she’s done, there are tear tracks marking both of their faces. There’s a sense of relief, to having heard her story. The years of just not knowing, of wondering if she was ok, if she was happy, if she was having a good birthday or watching the Harry Potter reruns on TV.

Jake buys them a new drink each, and then he tells her his side of the five years. Like side B of a tape. Jake tells her about the bad year. Not in full, not all of the gory details, but he tells her. It’s a part of him now, that year, so he’s going to be honest about it. He tells her how all of their friends (because no matter what, they didn’t stop being Amy’s friends too, not really) helped him through, how he met Alli, how he helped Charles teach Nikolaj to play basketball. He tells her about Rosa and Gina raising Indigo, about Cheddar passing, about Mabel. He tells her about the sergeant’s exam and Alli leaving but him being ok about it. He even tells her about seeing her on the video call at the conference.

And then they’re all caught up. Five years worth of stories and events that they’ve missed out on. But now it’s all out there, in words and tears and hot drinks.

Jake smiles at Amy across the table. There’s still so much that needs to be said. There’s still an underlying bitterness, sitting under Jake’s skin. It’s going to take them both a while to sort through their emotions. Maybe they won’t be friends right away. But Jake wants to try. He wants to get there. He doesn’t want to go back to an Amy-less life.      

“I’m glad you’re back,” he tells her softly.

“I’m glad you stayed,” she counters.

They smile at each other, comforting and familiar. Somewhere in the middle of the tabletop, their hands meet.

 

**August 9th, 2025**

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:02**

**Jake Peralta**

_Are u ready?_

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:04**

**Ames**

_Never been more ready for anything._

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:05**

**Ames**

_I love you._

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:07**

**Jake Peralta**

_I love you too babe, but I literally meant are u ready? We gotta be there soon._

  


**Text message  08/09/25   13:08**

**Ames**

_On my way! Did you check the thing with the photographer? And did you call the florist about the extra bouquet?_

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:11**

**Jake Peralta**

_I did! Santiago, I can’t believe u would doubt me like that._

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:12**

**Ames**

_I’m impressed, Peralta._

  

**Text message  08/09/25   13:16**

**Jake Peralta**

_I’m pretty impressive._

 

**Text message  08/09/25   13:17**

**Jake Peralta**

_See u at the altar._

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love, love is power, power is pizza, and pizza is knowledge.
> 
> Come yell at me @jakelovesamy on tumblr.


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